Activision GoldenEye remake leaked?

More rumours have emerged suggesting that Activision are working on a new GoldenEye game for the Wii and DS, although Rare have already denied any involvement.

GoldenEye 007 – Bond is back?

Last week some pretty unconvincing looking images emerged, that many assumed were fan-made fakes. Supposedly part of a customer survey from Activision, they showed some Wii box art, a James Bond themed lightgun holder and a gold Classic Controller Pro.

Previous to this Activision had been caught registering the website goldeneyegame.com, while what purported to be a leaked release schedule from GAME also listed a new GoldenEye title.

The images feature Daniel Craig as James Bond, instead of Pierce Brosnan , with some attached blurb talking about a “re-imagined” version of the 13 year old Nintendo 64 game and a “modernised version of the classic story”.

Also promised is an old school four-player split screen mode and an eight-player online option.

The original Nintendo 64 game, for those that weren’t around at the time, was not just a great James Bond game but a seminal first person shooter. Long before Halo it was the first critically and commercially successful game of its type on a console and sold over 8 million copies.

However, its complex development history has made any remake or re-release so far impossible. Not only do original publisher Nintendo no longer own the rights to the Bond license but developer Rare are now owned by Microsoft.

An Xbox Live Arcade remake was started but Microsoft and Nintendo couldn’t agree on terms and it was canned. (A remake of spiritual sequel Perfect Dark did go ahead though.)

Rare have denied any involvement in this new project but that’s probably not a great loss as most of the team involved with the original long ago left Rare to form Free Radical Design, now Crytek UK.

Instead, developer Eurocom is believed to be working on the game, with an expected November release date. Eurocom created the The World Is Not Enough tie-in and original title James Bond 007: NightFire (as well as James Bond Jr. for the SNES). Geist developer n-Space are also believed to be involved.

This wouldn’t be the first time another publisher has tried to cash-in on the success of the original game either, with Electronic Arts releasing the shamefully rubbish, but largely unconnected, GoldenEye: Rogue Agent in 2004.